U.S. intelligence has determined that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program, and the Iranian Mullahs have issued repeated assurances that it has no intention to start one, but we are suspicious. Russia and China want to constructively engage the Iranians rather than bully them, but they are also major trading partners with Iran, and so we don’t trust their motives.

We want Iran to come clean on its enrichment program and its nuclear power generation program, but Iran does not trust us. They don’t believe that detailed targeting information from inspections will not be made available to Israel, who will then use that as the basis for military strikes against the Iranian nuclear power facilities.

Awhile back we brokered a deal where Iran would ship its uranium to France to be enriched, but that deal fell through, in part because Iran was suspicious of a country as close to the US as is France. (No, that is not a joke.)

As a result, the US began two different approaches to solving the problem. It gave the go-ahead for Turkey and Brazil to negotiate the same deal with Iran, in the hopes that Iran would be more open on dealing with two countries not in the G8/NATO club. At the same time the US stepped up efforts to get Russia and China to agree to tougher sanctions.

Interestingly enough, both initiatives worked, and at exactly the same time. Last week Iran, Turkey, and Brazil reached an agreement on uranium enrichment where Iran would send half of its low-grade uranium to Turkey, which would in turn send it to France and/or Russia for enrichment to the 19.75 percent grade necessary for Iran’s medical reactor – essentially the same deal the U.S. wanted last October.

But at the same time, negotiations with Russia and China bore fruit, both agreeing to a tougher set of sanctions.

Presented with this embarrassment of riches, we have decided to go with sanctions. After all, why take yes for an answer?

The U.S. argument for why the Turkish-Brazilian deal is no good is that Iran did not promise to stop enriching uranium on its own. Iran counters that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty allows them to enrich uranium for peaceful use and enrichment to this level is not a violation of any existing treaty – and they are right.

The situation becomes even more bizarre when you consider that no one really has any reasonable expectation that sanctions will make Iran stop its enrichment program. Understanding that may be the beginning of wisdom.

The current round of sanctions is more a product of U.S. internal political forces than a coherent foreign policy initiative. President Obama has decided to cement his alliance with the “moderate hawks” in his own administration – Secretaries Gates and Clinton being the most prominent members of that group – as a hedge against more extreme Congressional war hawks. Gates and Clinton seem motivated less by fear of Iranian nuclear weapons and more by a desire to contain Iran on a regional basis. In that context, sanctions at least become understandable – they are intended to limit Iran’s finances, which make it harder for them to exert influence on their neighbors.

But although it makes sense, it is fundamentally dishonest. It raises the specter of a threat which we know not to be real, in order to justify a policy we know will not achieve the ends we publicly advocate, in order to achieve a secret end to deal with a secret threat. And why are they secret? We can’t get the world to agree to sanction someone just because we don’t like them, so instead we sell the lie.

This is what the British call “too clever by half,” and is exactly the sort of Machiavellian maneuvering which usually blows up in people’s faces. Speaking of which, General David Petraeus has recently authorized U.S. special operations forces to conduct reconnaissance missions in preparation for a U.S. military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, “in case President Obama orders one.”

Here is a link to an article on the Turkish-Brazilian deal with Iran.

Here is a link to the New York Times article announcing the breakthrough on sanctions.

Here is a link to the SOF news.

Here is a link to a good analysis piece by Juan Cole on the whole developing fiasco.

Click here to read the article on Ambassador Eikenberry’s concerns about troop levels in Afghanistan. You can also read a debate on Afghanistan policy and cast your vote in an on-line poll on GreatHistory’s partner site, ArmchairGeneral.com.

For more on North Korea’s bad-boy behavior, read Frank Chadwick’s North Korea: Peeing Blood on the Carpet.

The United States recently announced the termination of the European missile defense project, which had envisioned building a control facility and several anti-missile launch facilities in the Czech Republic and Poland. Nominally, the shield was intended to protect Europe from Iranian nuclear-tipped missiles – a threat which Europe has never actually lost any sleep over. In fact, the shield was meant as a means of providing an on-the-ground military presence in Eastern Europe which would serve as a check against future Russian expansionism. The Iranian “threat” was always a fig leaf to cover this, and when the Russians almost had a stroke over it, the previous administrations protested that the missile shield was not meant to stop Russian missiles.

Of course not. But it was aimed at Moscow nonetheless. It is instructive that all of the high-level protests from the former administration and its supporters talk about our commitments to the Czech Republic and Poland – neither of which were ever considered a target for Iranian missiles, just fly-over country. Senator John McCain (R, Arizona) is upset not about its effect on Iranian foreign policy, but rather upon Russian foreign policy, and doesn’t that about say it all?

Likewise, what negative reaction there has been from those two host countries has focused on the Russian threat, not the Iranian one. Former Czech Prime Minister Mirek Toplanek described it as “bad news for the Czech Republic.” Former Polish President Lech Walesa is unhappy with the decision as well.

Notice the common element in their titles? “Former.”

The current governments of the Czech Republic and Poland are less upset, and the deal was never wildly popular with the populations of those two nations, although it was more favorably received in Poland than the Czech Republic. Here’s how the current Czech Prime Minister, Vaclav Klaus, reacted: “I’m 100 percent convinced that the decision of the American government does not signal a cooling of relations between the United States and the Czech Republic.”

Okay, swell. So what is going on here, and does it have anything to do with Iran at all?

The idea that the best response to the possibility of Iranian nuclear warheads was to build an anti-missile shield in Eastern Europe was always really dumb. Nobody criticizing the current move can actually bring themselves to say otherwise. Instead they say it’s a concession to Russia (true), or it undermines our commitments to Eastern Europe (not true), or it underplays the threat of the Iranian nuclear program (really not true). But, “This strips Europe bare to Iranian nuclear attack!” is not a phrase which has passed anyone’s lips – because it is absurd on its face, and we all know it.

If we are going to keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, and if we are going to do it without bombing someone, then Russian cooperation on some level is necessary. That means establishing more constructive and less confrontational relations with them. It’s no coincidence that both the Czech Republic and Poland have been moving away from confrontation and toward re-engagement with Russia for some time.

So in the end committing to the anti-missiles had nothing to do with the Iranians, but reversing the policy has everything to do with them. It removes a program which was as effective in preventing an Iranian nuclear attack as if was in guarding against the bites of sharks. It replaces it with a policy much more likely to bear actual, tangible fruit.

What’s the down-side?

Well, for one thing it may actually work, which will mean we won’t have to bomb someone (or let Israel bomb someone), and there are folks who think bombing somebody every now and then is just a good idea on general principle.

The other problem with it is that it does not provide much opportunity for chest thumping. The leitmotif of U.S. foreign policy for quite some time has become the need for chest thumping and tough talk. We ain’t gonna let Russia push us around. No-sir-ee. Or Iran. Or Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or China. Or (shudder) France. It is based on the notion that foreign policy’s principle objective is not to actually get things done, but rather to make us feel better about ourselves – stand taller, renew our sense of pride.

Here’s what I think: You want to feel better about yourself? Get a dog.

Not that we should be listening to the leader of the Taliban, but fighting in Afghanistan has historically only guaranteed failure. Just ask the former Soviet Union about its non-success there.

Other notables who failed in Afghanistan include Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the Turks, and the Brits.

In fact, a recent report leaked to the Washington Post has the United States military admitting more troops or a new strategy is critical to victory in Afghanistan. Without either or both, we lose.

And it appears that Afghanistan is just getting more and more dangerous. But, as GreatHistory’s Frank Chadwick remarks, if anyone can win there, it’s the United States.

For a satirical synopsis of why war in Afghanistan in futile, watch this episode of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show.

—Rick Steves

Rick Steves is best known for his popular travel series on PBS, Rick Steves’ Europe. I have envied Rick as he makes his way through medieval castles and biergartens and art museums. I was pleasantly surprised this past winter when I flipped on the television and there was Rick Steves. In…Iran?

There was Rick Steves, boldly going where few Americans dare to go, frolicking around the ruins of ancient Persia, laughing with university students, visiting lush valleys, and eating food so succulent you could taste it through your television. Steves showed us that behind strange titles like the Supreme Leader and behind what many of us view as a tantrum-throwing Ahmadinejad and a nuclear program, there is a bold culture and a friendly populace within the Axis of Evil. Yes, it’s true, Virginia, actual humans live in Iran.

Still, sinister elements remain. And the contentious relationship between Iran and the United States continues to engender fear on both sides. Dr. Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian who also holds an American passport, reminds us of what happens to ordinary citizens who get caught between these two great nations. Her most recent book, My Prison, My Home: One Woman’s Story of Captivity in Iran, (HarperCollins, 2009) tells the horrifying ordeal of a woman falsely accused of colluding with the United States to overthrow the Iranian government. This unfounded accusation would land her in solitary confinement in the dreaded Evin Prison for 105 days.

Dr. Esfandiari is traveling to the Tehran airport on New Year’s Eve to return to her husband, child, and grandchildren back in the United States. On route, her passports and belongings are stolen, and she returns to her mother’s house and begins the arduous task of replacing her paperwork so she can leave the country. But over the next few months, she meets with hurdle after hurdle from the Iranian bureaucracy. She is ordered to report to the Intelligence Ministry day after day and is subjected to questions about her marriage to a Jewish man, her work with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and her former work on various newspapers in Iran. The interrogation scenes remind me of a McCarthy hearing or a famous Kafka story. After months of paranoid questioning, she is arrested and taken to Evin Prison.

Through her work with the Wilson Center, Dr. Esfandiari was guilty of nothing more than bringing intellectuals together to bridge the very gap in communication and understanding that led to her arrest in the first place. She herself recognizes this:

When I returned to Iran in December of 2006, I did not realize I was walking into the heart of a storm. It was fueled by long-standing animosity between Tehran and Washington, an ineffective and ultimately harmful program of democracy promotion that contributed to my detention and that of many others, and an iron determination by Iran’s security services to squash all American plans regarding the Islamic Republic” (121).

Now before we go name-calling and call the Americans the moral victors in the Iran-US fight, let’s look back at Iran’s history before 1979. When the shah came to power in 1941, it was an ally of the West. During the Cold War, Iran looked to the United States for protection against the Soviet Union.

But 1953 changed all that. In 1953, during the oil nationalization crisis, the shah was losing power. It was only through a coup manufactured by the CIA and British intelligence that the shah was able to retain power. The Iranians never forgot this. The shah was consistently viewed by some of his own people as a puppet of the United States. The powerful Ayatollah Khomeini continually reminded his fellow Iranians of this and in 1979, the monarchy was overthrown.

Then, on November 4, 1979, the students of Tehran’s universities stormed the American embassy and took 60 hostages and held 52 of them for 444 days.

And during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, the US supported Iraq and its leader Saddam Hussein.

If we cannot forgive Iran for kidnapping our diplomats and imprisoning intellectuals like Esfandiari, then maybe we can understand, just a little better, why they might be paranoid. Maybe. Maybe not.

We’re used to the twentieth century’s rules of geopolitics. Those rules frame conflicts in terms of nation-states: World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, The Arab-Israeli Wars, and the Gulf Wars. Our defense and foreign policy is geared toward dealing with nation-states and has noticeable difficulties dealing with non-state adversaries. Unfortunately, the most likely cast of adversarial characters in the coming century will be non-national players. Here are a couple to keep an eye out for.

Tribes
Tribes have been around a long time and they aren’t going away. In fact, they are enjoying a sort of comeback. Traditionally, tribes are people bound by birth, marriage, or rite of passage to a group which looks out for the interests of the group members.

The birth-or-marriage tribes are common outside the industrialized “western” world and wax where government wanes. The rite of passage tribes are arguably as important and include street gangs and radical political or ideological associations (such as the Aryan Nation now and the Knights Templar back in the day). Routine associations abound in any society; it is only when the members of a group begin feeling greater loyalty to their closed group than they do to the nation/society as a whole that they’ve “gone tribal.”

Dealing with places like Somalia and Afghanistan, or the tribal areas of western Pakistan gets very tricky. It’s going to get more tricky, not less. As corruption (more on that in a moment) in the governments of some “developed” nations cause them to become less responsive to the needs of their citizens, modern tribes will rise to fill the vacuum.

Five Guys Named Guido
Crime is going to be a growth industry in this century. It already is. Crime on a global scale is driven by widening gaps between the rich and poor. That isn’t a sociological statement, it’s a simple economic one. Regardless of individual motivation, the economic pressure is clear. People in the wealthy nations demand recreational drugs; people in the poorer nations provide them; and enormously rich drug cartels arise to manage the transaction. Much of the world’s wealth moves by sea, passing by some of the poorest regions on the earth. Former fishermen with no food but plenty of Kalashnikovs and Rocket Propelled Grenades go down to the sea in boats to grab some. As energy prices climb, more and more wealth is concentrated in energy-producing private and public institutions, creating more incentive to corrupt and control those institutions for personal gain. More and more the aggressive, dangerous players in the world are becoming cartels, pirate alliances, and oil “mafias.”

The Ayatolla of Whatever
Militant religion is a form of tribalism, and militant religion is on the rise in the developing world. Nigeria is in danger of being torn apart, as the north is increasingly in the grip of militant Islamists and the south militant evangelical Christians. The recent violence was in the north, but the southern Christians are capable of violence as well. As militant Christianity spreads in Africa, “witch” killings become more and more frequent. La Familia, the violent and explosively growing Mexican drug and crime alliance, preaches its own brand of evangelical Christianity. It sees itself as a serious social movement, and it is: scary and very, very serious.

The New Folks In Town
As climate change, tribal and civil warfare, and exhausted farm land cause increasing displacement of populations, nations will suddenly acquire pre-packaged ethnic minorities, destitute and desperate. This is already a problem in places such as Kenya and western Pakistan and could be an explosive problem along the American southwestern border if Central America continues its slide into poverty. The population movements into Europe from North Africa cause mounting problems there. Russia’s declining birth rate and the high birth rate in the former Soviet states to the south in Central Asia and the Caucasus threaten similar problems, and to an extent are at the root of the long-standing conflict with Chechnya.

All of these potential adversaries have one thing in common: they are not state-based. Our strategic deterrent forces, including nuclear forces, are useless against Mafiosi, pirates, and desperate refugees. Dealing with those adversaries will require finesse.

We can still do finesse — can’t we?